GAUVIN: Voters should not underestimate(the impact of individual “turnout”

Written by Paul Gauvin

September 14, 2012

A secularist and an evangelical were arguing about the moment when life begins. “At conception,” argued the evangelical. “At birth,” claimed the secularist.

An aged rabbi sitting nearby reading The Wall Street Journal through bifocals interjected himself into the debate: “I have lived a long life and I have seen and felt much. I’ll tell you when life begins,” he smiled patronizingly. “It begins when your dog dies and your children leave.”

End of debate? Not hardly.

Like so many other social aspects of life in the United (?) States the disputes over such questions rage on in the quest for a final but elusive consensus that is out of the margin-of-error range; in other words, a mandate.

In the absence of a verifiable e-mail from the creator of the universe then, it is up to humans to decide when life begins to suit their own sense of logic and social condition. Obviously, humans don’t agree on that or much else for that matter when it comes to politics. Some put on the right shoe first, others the left and so on.

There was a television program recently that depicted a primitive tribe of people - I didn’t catch where – whose infant mortality rate was so very high, they decided to count a child’s first birthday when he or she was one year old and had escaped early death. Is that when life begins for them? The age of 1?

There was a miniscule movement toward a mandate in Barnstable last week when a whopping 20 percent of the town’s voters spent a few precious minutes at the primary polls, there to nominate, in some cases, and actually elect in others without competition in November, candidates for a few local, county, state and federal seats.

It can’t be called a done deal yet, but local voters gamely stood for U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, Harvard law professor and fierce advocate for the rights of women and consumers. She is the crowbar in the Democrats’ effort to dislodge freshman GOP Sen. Scott Brown, whose party is the rock blocking the cave exit to social progress and is for the most part intractably pro-life.

A curiosity occurred: Sen. Brown received 99.75 percent of the vote, but…but… Mrs. Warren actually won the day with a lower percentage - 96.18 percent - of the vote. How can that be?

The magic word is “turnout.”

Neither Warren nor Brown had primary competition. They were going to be nominated no matter what…barring a very unlikely write-in campaign by an escapee from the cuckoo’s nest.

Warren would have been the victor - if this had been the final say on the election - because more Democrats and/or Democrat-leaning independents than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents showed up to cast their all-important one vote.

The total Democratic votes cast in that race by Barnstable residents was 3,399. Of that number, 3,269 votes were cast for Warren and 130 in the write-in column.

Sen. Brown is in the minority party in a town where Democrats outnumber Republicans considerably. Of 1,961 Republican ballots cast in that race’s primary, 1,956 votes were recorded for Brown, with five write-in votes, a few of which might have been for Clint Eastwood in the wake of his GOP convention parley-vous.

In that respect, then, Warren won with 3,269 votes to Brown’s 1,956 or by 1,313 votes, roughly two to one, because of turnout.

It is a living lesson that turnout of every voter does matter immensely and if the Democrats of Barnstable expect to help save the U.S. Senate from the control of the Tea Party radicals who would undo the current health care system rather than tweak it to perfection, they had best keep it up.

Warren is of the progressive view that, insofar as intractable religious and political beliefs defy compromise, the individual woman, it follows, is the logical final arbiter of her own body and her own fate. In this way, a woman can be of any religious or political stripe and still decide for her own body.

While local Republicans are expected to work as hard as local Democrats over the Senate seat, they might have lost an opportunity to add to their state legislative ranks by not fielding a candidate for the 2nd Barnstable District seat held for 14 years by Democrat Demetrius Atsalis. His recurring campaign finance problems evidently undermined his incumbent’s edge in the primary.

Atsalis’ defeat at the hands of Hyannis attorney Brian Mannal would have given a serious Republican candidate a relatively even chance to carry the battle into the Nov. 6 election without having to contend with the incumbent’s edge. As it now stands, Mannal is already the November victor.

These races continue to underscore the unrivaled importance of local voter turnout.